Company

Today we crossed a major milestone: 100,000 businesses now use Shopify to power their stores.

The first Shopify store was actually my own. Almost a decade ago, I wanted to sell snowboards online. The options for shopping carts were either extremely expensive, or painfully complicated. Eventually this frustration was channeled into creating Shopify. We set out on a mission: to make ecommerce easier and more affordable, so that anyone could start their own online store.

Today, I’m happy to announce that Shopify has raised $100 million in Series C funding. I am excited to welcome OMERS Ventures and Insight Venture Partners to our team, along with Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital, Georgian Partners and Felicis Ventures. These are some of the most prestigious venture capital firms in the world, and I’m honoured to have them join us in our mission to make commerce better.

It’s hard to believe that Shopify has come this far. It feels like yesterday that my co-founders and I were working out of a coffee shop trying to find the best way to sell snowboards online. Our options were either wildly expensive or painfully complicated, so we built our own. It didn’t take long to realize we should stop selling snowboards and start selling the software we created to build the store. That was the best decision of my life.

Today, Shopify has over 300 employees and powers over 80,000 online stores in 100 different countries. By the end of the year, our merchants will have sold well over $1.5 billion in products in 2013 alone. And although we’re the fastest growing ecommerce platform in the world, this is just the beginning.